Feast of Weeds (Books 1--4)

by Jamie Thornton

  I pushed her into the nearest dumpster and kept my crossbow lifted and ready to shoot anyone who dared show their face.

  She stayed in the fever for hours. She tumbled back and forth on old food wrappers and lumpy plastic bags. Her face was flushed and when she moaned I tensed, waiting for Vs to hear it. I used the bungee cords to tie her hands and feet together—that was the rule Spencer had made. It kept someone in the fevers from hurting themselves or anyone else. But there was nothing else to do except watch and pretend I couldn’t hear the terrible memories she was reliving—and stand guard until my arms couldn’t lift the crossbow anymore.

  I think I shot off my crossbow once. I don’t know if it had been at something real. Sometimes the memories are like that—ghosts that fly into reality and become part of the scene around you.

  My arms had turned to Jello by the time she came out of the fevers. I could barely pull myself back over the edge of the dumpster. We picked up the bikes I’d abandoned on the sidewalk when Maibe went under. Before the infection had taken down the city I’d done my bike up with silver streamers and a skull and crossbones sticker.

  As we pedaled, life returned to my arms. We didn’t speak to each other. She couldn’t talk and there was nothing I could say. Though there were plenty of signs that life had been around at some point, there was nothing alive now: abandoned cars, broken glass, a hydrant that gushed water and flooded one street, bodies laying still on the ground.

  I’d bet my best sleeping bag that Faints filled every house in sight. They were like the opposite of Vs. They went comatose and sometimes did their own version of sleepwalking, but they were mostly neutral. When me and the rest of us had almost come out of the fevers, Dr. Ferrad was there too, recovering from her own fevers. She’d told us that Faints were people who only caught the bacteria—though she didn’t know how that was possible. The bacteria wasn’t supposed to be contagious like the V virus.

  What mattered about Faints though was they didn’t come after you like the Vs did, but they could still cause trouble, plus they were super creepy all sleepwalking around with smiles plastered on their faces half the time.

  Yeah, I’d told Maibe houses weren’t safe. And they weren’t. But I also couldn’t bear to step inside one and run into a Faint.

  We rode by a car with its windows busted and a body humped over the steering wheel. He could have been drunk and passed out like my dad used to get, except blood spatter marked up the pieces of windshield glass on the hood and road, and his head seemed sort of caved in.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Maibe said.

  I felt perfectly fine and wondered what that said about me. “Just don’t look.”

  We passed through a four-way stop with a stalled car in the middle. Mary sat on the hood of the car, her jet black hair falling around her shoulders. She waved and smiled at me as if nothing were wrong. My bike wobbled and I lost feeling in my fingers. I knew it was a ghost-memory, but I couldn’t see anything except her until I slammed into the stalled car and tumbled over the handlebars and through the spot where she’d been sitting. She disappeared then as I lay splayed out on the hood.

  I closed my eyes for a moment because I was so tired of it all.

  The squeak of a wheel made me open my eyes again. Maibe had picked my bike off the ground and flipped it over. The skull and crossbones sticker was all scratched to pieces now and half the streamers had ripped off. She was trying to spin the front wheel and unbend what couldn’t be unbent.

  “I need another bike,” I said, but my voice trembled. We’d already lost so much time. Either I walked the rest of the way, or I searched a nearby house for another bike. “We’ll have to search the houses.”

  “We can’t go in,” Maibe said. “We can’t! You said houses were dangerous, the most dangerous, the—”

  “I need a bike,” I said simply. I limped over to a garage with a dark strip at the bottom. Maybe it wasn’t locked and I wouldn’t need to enter a house at all. There was no hum of electricity, only the smell of grease and oil and metal. I stood up, put both hands underneath the lip of the garage door, and the door went up with a screech. Geometric shapes edged the interior. Something red and metal and bike-like gleamed in the corner. Something else smelled like wet socks that hadn’t been allowed to dry.

  My muscles knew before my brain could process it. Two people stood against a workbench, backs to me. Faints.

  Faint skin looked like ours. It was weird because V skin didn’t—theirs was like normal.

  We could walk to Cal Expo.

  There was no good reason to step into this garage, to the bike waiting like a present in the back corner. I could lower the garage door and turn around. I almost did because the Faints creeped me out worse than the Vs, worse than others like me and Maibe—Feebs—with weird skin and even weirder memories. Faints were still people, still alive, but locked in somehow differently than Vs.

  “Is there a bike?” Maibe said from behind me.

  “Shh,” I said and dropped my arms. Sometimes you could wake up a Faint and that was even worse. “Yeah, but it’s not worth it.” I said this in a whisper as I turned around and walked down the driveway. I wouldn’t risk bringing the door back down, better just to leave.

  “What?”

  “There’s Faints,” I said, trying not to let the fear show in my voice.

  Maibe cocked her head and drew her eyebrows together. “So?”

  “So,” I said. “We’re moving on.”

  “That’s it? But they’re Faints, they’re not going to bother you, they’re not going to do anything except maybe run through some old memory about taking out the trash or changing the sheets or cooking dinner. Did I tell you Faints saved Corrina and me?” Maibe waved her arms around in pantomime. “The Vs had followed us and she had gotten bit and the virus was flaring up again and—” Her voice trailed off and she looked at something over my shoulder.

  The two Faints had moved to the garage opening. A black and white spotted cat twined in and around their legs, meowing outrageously at their lack of attention. They held hands. A middle-aged couple underneath the afflicted skin. Something about the look of the man, the scruff of his growing beard, the disarray of his hair, the mean hook of his nose, the way that he gripped the woman’s hand, like she was a possession he intended to hurt—it made my knees weak and wobbly.

  I willed back the tendrils of memory that crept out—long nights spent curled in a pink comforter listening for the yelling and fighting and the crash of glass. The creak of my bedroom door opening, the sour stink of alcohol—he couldn’t hurt me anymore and I wasn’t letting anyone hurt me anymore and this was just a Faint and they might be sick and needed my pity but they couldn’t hurt me and—

  “Can I help you?” said the woman in the driveway. My head cleared as I focused on her face. Her eyes were still glassy and unfocused, but something had triggered her to run a memory out loud. “Can I help you?” She scratched her wrist and looked at the man without really looking at him. “George, go see what they want.”

  George dropped the woman’s hand and took a step down the driveway. I stepped back, and back, and back, until the car and the crippled bike and the dead Vs were between me and him.

  “Gabbi?” Maibe said, her tone containing equal parts question and concern.

  “I…” I leaned against the metal car door and slid to the ground. My palms burned as if someone had placed my hands on a hot electric stove, not someone, not anyone, but him, him over there behind the car, walking down the driveway to continue his business, as he liked to call it, walking down the hallway to drag me out of my room and into the kitchen and before I could stop it the sky and the Vs and the fog disappeared and there was only darkness and burning and his laugh.

  Chapter 3

  Maibe stood over me with a red bike in her hands talking about Faints and smoke. I blinked, groaned, shook my head, told myself to get over myself. I’d had that same damn memory-rush before. It wasn’t new and it
wasn’t real.

  My tongue felt so dry. I coughed and stared at a patch of blood on the knee of my jeans. Was it mine or a V’s? Either way it needed to come off. The best way to get caught and sent back would be to look like I didn’t belong. To stand out with dirty clothes or a sunburn or that layer of homeless grunge that happened when you couldn’t shower for four days in a row.

  My head cleared.

  I remembered it wasn’t that kind of world anymore.

  Part of my brain believed it, but the rest of me couldn’t give up a strategy that had worked so many times before. My stomach cramped at the thought of leaving that blood in place like I held a blinking “homeless kid” sign above my head.

  Acid burned my throat. A sip of water, I needed a sip of water.

  I forced out a word. “Backpack.”

  Maibe stopped talking and brought over the bag. I ripped into the main compartment, took out a plastic water bottle, and chugged it. Cold water relieved my throat. The memory-rushes were a pain in the ass, but the alternative—becoming a Faint or a V—was worse. I didn’t like how the rushes made me feel: groggy, young, powerless, but I reminded myself that I had left. I had taken control of my future and they hadn’t ever caught me, not after that first time.

  “We should go before more Vs show up or before the couple comes back out,” Maibe said. “I got the bike ready while you were out…they were nice, the people I mean, not that they knew it was me or what I was doing.”

  I rubbed my temples and then used the car to help myself stand. Everything seemed steady enough, though my hands still burned from my skid on the asphalt. I swung a leg over the red bike. The garage door still gaped open, and through it another door to the house was open.

  In the rectangle of light two figures moved around. The air smelled sour as if food had been left to rot. I secured my backpack and crossbow and took off down the street. Behind me, Maibe’s shoes slapped on the pavement as she scrambled to follow. I spent a half second of thought on apologizing to her for taking off without even a thank you, but I decided to screw it. The blood flowing through my veins as I pumped the pedals helped beat back the last bits of the memory-rush.

  For a while, the only sounds were the birds, the whir of our tires, the squeak of a pedal. A few blocks down, three Vs appeared between houses and ran out to us, their arms flailing in the air. We pedaled faster and our bikes kept us ahead them.

  We picked up two more Vs on the next street.

  Five more on the street after.

  We stayed out of their reach and for a while even thought we’d lost them.

  Some of the streets billowed black smoke and we couldn’t avoid it once. Flames licked up the side of a two-story before jumping to the next roof. The burning plastic and glass and wood, and who knows what other chemicals, forced tears down my cheeks. I wondered how many Faints were still in those buildings and then told myself not to think about it. I pulled my knit beanie low over my ears and brought up the collar of my jacket to form a poor man’s filter. It helped, but Maibe’s hoodie didn’t have enough fabric and she started coughing up a lung behind me.

  There ended up being no way around the fire, so we retreated several blocks before finding another outlet. That’s when the Vs caught up to us again.

  We flew down the trail, trying to get as much distance between us and the Vs as possible. A few miles later we made it to the fairgrounds’ gate entrance—the chain-link fence, the gatekeeper box, the makeshift barricade of cars and junk and barbed wire that separated us from the parking lot, and beyond that, the curve of a wall where Cal Expo really started.

  “So how do we get in?” Maibe asked, looking at me with a confidence I didn’t feel. “What’s the plan?”

  I could have told her—I should have. I didn’t have a plan. The Vs were a few blocks behind us but would catch up soon. The plan was to get to Cal Expo and find a way inside. Spencer could have done better. He’d always been the idea guy, the one with the solution to our hungry stomachs, shelter for a cold night, talking our way out of the halfway houses, keeping us out of trouble with the pigs and the pimps and the do-gooders.

  “Trust me,” I said. I waited for her to cuss at me, yell at me, do something to stand up to me. That’s what Ricker would have done, and Mary and the rest too.

  That’s what Maibe should have done.

  You never trust someone who suddenly wants to take responsibility for you. Never.

  I didn’t know what to do next, but I pretended that I did by walking along the fenceline. Even though it was cold, sweat broke out on my forehead. I didn’t know what I was going to tell her. I did know we could not fight the dozen Vs headed our way. I gripped the chain-link with both hands until the metal turned my skin purple. I wasn’t the one who got people out of messes. Mary had known that, Spencer knew it. We were going to die against this fence and—

  And then I saw it, by the hedge, in the dirt.

  Underneath the fence was a hole big enough for a teenager to fit through.

  The dirt felt damp from the fog. It soothed my stinging hands and smelled like heaven compared to the smoke we’d been breathing. I pulled myself out the other side, scratching my back on the chain-link edges. Maibe crawled after me. I helped her up and brushed off the leaves that clung to her sweatshirt.

  Dried smoke-tears had left dirt tracks down Maibe’s cheeks. Red rimmed her eyes. I opened up the last of our water bottles and used it to scrub our faces and douse off the dumpster smell. I couldn’t stand being dirty another second longer, even with the Vs behind us.

  The hedge and hole were part of a narrow greenbelt strip that ran from the fence to the curved wall of the racetrack. It separated two parking lots and wasn’t more than a dozen feet wide. Trash floated in crazy twirls across the empty space. The place looked unguarded, though a group of spindly oak trees lining the greenbelt blocked a clear view. Either the people inside the fairgrounds had turned stupid or they didn’t have enough people to set up this wide of a perimeter. Lucky for us either way.

  I took off along the greenbelt. Maibe followed.

  A skittering sound made my heart pound in my throat. My shoes sunk into ground made soft and slippery from decomposing leaves. Smells of wood and grass hit my nose. I didn’t let us stop until we passed through the trees and back onto the strip of asphalt that bordered the racing wall. When we did I fell onto my knees and rested my forehead against the wall. We’d made it inside, now all we had to do was find Leaf and Ano and the rest of the group and figure out how to save them. Easy—yeah, right.

  There was a scratching sound…I looked back the way we’d come.

  The barricade still stood untouched, but the bush on the fence was moving. It shook like a wild animal ran circles around its base, and then it went still.

  I narrowed my eyes, trying to bring it all into better focus.

  There.

  A figure pulled itself through our gap in the dirt.

  The person stood up. It was a hundred, maybe two hundred, yards away and something was very wrong.

  Sometimes it was hard to tell a V from a distance if it was standing still. There were no telltale signs of their virus like with Feebs and Faints until you got close. Sometimes when Vs moved their limbs, they jerked around like the two parts of the brain were telling the body different things. That’s what this one looked like. He stood up and sprinted across the lot in our direction. The bush shivered again and a second one came up. In the time it took this second one to stand, a third one followed.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  I followed the curve of the wall. The noise of a rifle went—pop-pop-pop—above us. I turned back and the first V lay on the asphalt, unmoving.

  So maybe there was a guard, but he hadn’t been doing his job until now.

  Another two pops and the second V went down, but the third one kept coming and it was smart enough or lucky enough to run into the greenbelt and the trees blocked the shots.

  There were shouts above me. The
third V weaved between the trees, disappearing, appearing, nearing. A fourth V scrambled through the fence and another waited, almost patiently, in line.

  I grabbed Maibe’s arm and took us onto a maintenance road and then behind the back of a building. Two buildings formed a sort of alleyway between them. On our side was emptiness. On the other side the alley opened up to a type of square where people were sorting supplies, preparing food, handing out clothing, packing up boxes and loading the boxes onto trucks. But where were the trucks going, wasn’t everyone who needed the supplies already here?

  A table of blankets sat in the alleyway. Inspiration hit and I walked up to the table as if I knew exactly what I was doing. I grabbed a stack and pushed half of them into Maibe’s arms.

  I didn’t let myself think too hard on the lack of guards other than a passing thought that it sure looked as if someone was trying to get people killed. A part of me couldn’t understand leaving the route we’d just run unprotected. Unless there weren’t enough guards anymore.

  It didn’t matter. The uninfected would lock me up in seconds if they saw who I really was. They believed they were the last real humans on earth. They wanted their old houses and cars and jobs and they wanted to tell people like me what I could and couldn’t do. They judged me for living on the street and would kill me for getting sick with the virus and bacteria that THEY had gotten me sick with.

  Maibe touched my arm, bringing me back. I flinched. She drew her hand away.

  “We’ve been asked to take this to the sleeping quarters.” I pulled my hood low over my forehead, repositioned the backpack and crossbow on my shoulders, and carried the blankets high enough to obscure the bottom half of my face. Maibe’s wide, unblinking eyes flitted between me and the people ahead.

  “We’re just going to walk in there? That’s the plan?”

  “If we act like we belong, no one will question it. If we act like we’re supposed to get caught, we’ll get caught.” It was the very first thing you learned on the street. Don’t stand out. Blend in.